February 12, 2007

The barrage against "Barack"

Sen. Barack Obama has already faced tiresome media scrutiny about
his
last name ("Obama" evokes Osama!)
and his middle name ("Hussein"
evokes Saddam!), so it was only a matter of time before his first name
got the once-over. Even though David Wallis of Slate described
"Barack" as "unfamiliar but innocuous" and hence the least problematic
of his three names, now comes some fresh nonsense claiming that Obama
has been somehow duplicitous in explaining the origins of his given
name. The charge was aired by Mike Allen,
former White House correspondent for Time
who was recently snapped up by a new online magazine called The Politico. On Feb. 10, Allen
published a piece entitled "Undoing
Obama: Inside the Coming Effort to Dismantle A Candidate," which
warns Obama that his "free ride is ending" and that he is
about to "endure a going-over that would make a proctologist blush." So
what's the very first question that Allen says Obama will have to
answer?

Why has he sometimes said his first name is
Arabic, and other times
Swahili?

Further down, Allen elaborates on the question:

Even his name offers fodder for the critics.
When he was growing up,
his family, friends and teachers called him "Barry." Then as a
young
man, he started insisting on "Barack," explaining in a memoir published
in 1995 that his grandfather was a Muslim and that it means "blessed"
in Arabic. His dad, who was Kenyan, had gone by "Barry" -- probably
trying to fit in when he came to the States, his son figured. On the
campaign trail during his 2004 Senate race, Obama told reporters
that "Barack" was Swahili for "blessed by God."

Is this really the best that Obama's opponents can do? And shouldn't
a seasoned political reporter like Mike Allen have done just a little
bit of legwork to investigate this alleged inconsistency? Many voices
in the blogosphere, such as Brad
DeLong, Matthew
Yglesias, and The
Poor Man, pounced on Allen's story to make a very simple point:
there is no inconsistency in Obama's interpretations, since "Barack" is
rooted in both Arabic and
Swahili. Swahili has an enormous number of loanwords from Arabic, and
"Bara(c)k" is pretty obviously one of them. It's derived from the
Arabic triliteral B-R-K (برك), the morphological basis for many words
having to do with the act of blessing. Commenting on Crooks
and Liars, bulbul
(one of the erudite regulars in Languagehat's
comment section) provides this helpful background:

I'd venture a guess and say that
Obama's name comes from "baaraka" (بارك), a III. form verb which most
often crops up in the phrase "baarak(a) Allaah fiik" (بارك الله فيك)
meaning "may God bless you" or even "thank you". My Swahili dictionary
lists "barak(a)" as a noun meaning "blessing, prosperity, abundance".
The Arabic for "blessed" is "mubaarak" (مبارك), as in the surname of
the Egyptian president.
So
to recap: Barak Obama's first name is both Swahili (as it is a part of
Swahili lexicon) and Arabic (since it is Arabic by origin).

Some of the critics of Allen's piece could stand
to do a little
linguistic research too. Matt Stoller on MyDD claims
that "Swahili and Arabic are extremely similar languages because of
millenia of trade between East Africa and the Middle East." Similarly, The
Daily Background posits that "Swahili is very similar to Arabic (in
fact the former evolved out of the latter)." Swahili and Arabic are in
different, unrelated language families, and any similarities derive
strictly from Arabic borrowings into the Swahili lexicon. Meanwhile, Media Matters
admirably links to the Kamusi
Project, a Swahili dictionary project originally at Yale,
but misreads the entry for barak(a).
Bariki is not the Arabic root,
as Media Matters claims, but is rather one of the related Swahili
words listed in the entry (kibaraka and tabaruki are also listed).

Journalistic silliness over Obama's first name
is nothing new. Back in July 2004, when Obama was first running for
Senate,
Jim Geraghty of the National
Review Online was already depicting him as the Democrats' dream
candidate:

Before
ducking off from the press scrum, Obama took a moment to explain that
his first name is Swahili, and means "one who is blessed by God." It
also relates, through Arabic and Semitic roots, to the Hebrew baruch,
which means "blessed."
An African-American Senate candidate who can speak a little Hebrew?
Could focus groups have come up with a better candidate for a diverse
America?

Arabic barak(a) is cognate
with Hebrew baruch, so Obama
can "speak a little Hebrew"? I'm hoping Geraghty was just joking about
that. But if questions linger about the origins of "Barack," I wouldn't
be surprised if Obama defuses the doubters by pointing out the shared Semitic root of baruch. Along the same lines, the New
York Times recently reported on an imam and a rabbi in Minneapolis
who jointly teach lessons on the kinship between Arabic and Hebrew,
"using etymology as a symbol of a shared Abrahamic
heritage." That sounds like a refreshing application of etymological
understanding, and a welcome antidote to divisive arguments about
language, culture, and religion.

[Update, 2/14: See this follow-up post for various reader comments and questions.]